Subtitles and Transcript

Jon Mooallem

0:11
So it was the fall of 1902,and President Theodore Rooseveltneeded a little break from the White House,so he took a train to Mississippito do a little black bear hunting outside of a towncalled Smedes.The first day of the hunt,
they didn't see a single bear,so it was a big bummer for everyone,but the second day, the dogs cornered oneafter a really long chase, but by that point,the president had given upand gone back to camp for lunch,so his hunting guide cracked the animalon the top of the head with the butt of his rifle,and then tied it up to a treeand started tooting away on his bugleto call Roosevelt back so he could have the honorof shooting it.The bear was a female.It was dazed, injured,severely underweight, a little mangy-looking,and when Roosevelt saw this animaltied up to the tree,he just couldn't bring himself to fire at it.He felt like that would go against his codeas a sportsman.

1:08
A few days later, the scene was memorializedin a political cartoon back in Washington.It was called "Drawing a Line in Mississippi,"and it showed Roosevelt with
his gun down and his arm out,sparing the bear's life,and the bear was sitting on its hind legswith these two big, frightened, wide eyesand little ears pricked up at the top of its head.It looked really helpless, like you just wanted tosweep it up into your armsand reassure it.It wouldn't have looked familiar at the time,but if you go looking for the cartoon now,you recognize the animal right away:It's a teddy bear.And this is how the teddy bear was born.Essentially, toymakers took
the bear from the cartoon,turned it into a plush toy, and then named itafter President Roosevelt -- Teddy's bear.

1:47
And I do feel a little ridiculousthat I'm up here on this stageand I'm choosing to use my timeto tell you about a 100-year-old storyabout the invention of a squishy kid's toy,but I'd argue that the invention of the teddy bear,inside that story is a more important story,a story about how dramatically our ideasabout nature can change,and also about how, on the planet right now,the stories that we tellare dramatically changing nature.

2:17
Because think about the teddy bear.For us, in retrospect, it feels like an obvious fit,because bears are so cute and cuddly,and who wouldn't want to give
one to their kids to play with,but the truth is that in 1902,bears weren't cute and cuddly.I mean, they looked the same,but no one thought of them that way.In 1902, bears were monsters.Bears were something that frickin' terrified kids.For generations at that point,the bear had been a shorthand for all the dangerthat people were encountering on the frontier,and the federal government was actuallysystematically exterminating bearsand lots of other predators too,like coyotes and wolves.These animals, they were being demonized.They were called murderersbecause they killed people's livestock.One government biologist, he explained thiswar on animals like the bear by sayingthat they no longer had a placein our advancing civilization,and so we were just clearing them out of the way.In one 10-year period, close to half a million wolveshad been slaughtered.The grizzly would soon be wiped outfrom 95 percent of its original territory,and whereas once there had been 30 million bisonmoving across the plains, and you would havethese stories of trains having to stopfor four or five hours so that these thick,living rivers of the animals could pour over the tracks,now, by 1902, there were maybe
less than 100 left in the wild.And so what I'm saying is, the teddy bear was borninto the middle of this great spasm of extermination,and you can see it as a sign thatmaybe some people deep downwere starting to feel conflicted about all that killing.America still hated the bear and feared it,but all of a sudden, America also wantedto give the bear a great big hug.

3:59
So this is something that I've been really
curious about in the last few years.How do we imagine animals,how do we think and feel about them,and how do their reputations get writtenand then rewritten in our minds?We're here living in the eye of a great stormof extinction where half the species on the planetcould be gone by the end of the century,and so why is it that we come to care aboutsome of those species and not others?Well, there's a new field, a relatively new fieldof social science that started looking atthese questions and trying to unpack the powerfuland sometimes pretty schizophrenic relationshipsthat we have to animals,and I spent a lot of time looking throughtheir academic journals,and all I can really say is that their findingsare astonishingly wide-ranging.So some of my favorites include thatthe more television a person
watches in Upstate New York,the more he or she is afraidof being attacked by a black bear.If you show a tiger to an American,they're much more likely to assume that it's femaleand not male.In a study where a fake snakeand a fake turtle were put on the side of the road,drivers hit the snake much
more often than the turtle,and about three percent of
drivers who hit the fake animalsseemed to do it on purpose.Women are more likely than men to get a"magical feeling" when they see dolphins in the surf.Sixty-eight percent of mothers with"high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem"identified with the dancing catsin a commercial for Purina. (Laughter)Americans consider lobstersmore important than pigeonsbut also much, much stupider.Wild turkeys are seen as only slightly
more dangerous than sea otters,and pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs.

5:31
So some of this is physical, right?We tend to sympathize more
with animals that look like us,and especially that resemble human babies,so with big, forward-facing eyesand circular faces,kind of a roly-poly posture.This is why, if you get a Christmas card from, like,your great aunt in Minnesota,there's usually a fuzzy penguin chick on it,and not something like a Glacier Bay wolf spider.But it's not all physical, right?There's a cultural dimension to
how we think about animals,and we're telling stories about these animals,and like all stories,they are shaped by the times and the placesin which we're telling them.So think about that momentback in 1902 again where a ferocious bearbecame a teddy bear.What was the context?
Well, America was urbanizing.For the first time, nearly a
majority of people lived in cities,so there was a growing distance
between us and nature.There was a safe space where we couldreconsider the bear and romanticize it.Nature could only start to
seem this pure and adorablebecause we didn't have to be afraid of it anymore.And you can see that cycle playing outagain and again with all kinds of animals.It seems like we're always stuck betweendemonizing a species and wanting to wipe it out,and then when we get very close to doing that,empathizing with it as an underdogand wanting to show it compassion.So we exert our power,but then we're unsettledby how powerful we are.

6:45
So for example, this is one ofprobably thousands of letters and drawingsthat kids sent to the Bush administration,begging it to protect the polar bearunder the Endangered Species Act,and these were sent back in the mid-2000s,when awareness of climate
change was suddenly surging.We kept seeing that image of a polar bearstranded on a little ice floelooking really morose.I spent days looking through these files.I really love them. This one's my favorite.If you can see, it's a polar bear that's drowningand then it's also being eaten simultaneouslyby a lobster and a shark.This one came from a kid named Fritz,and he's actually got a solution to climate change.He's got it all worked out to an ethanol-based solution.He says, "I feel bad about the polar bears.I like polar bears.Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From Fritz."So 200 years ago, you would have Arctic explorerswriting about polar bears leaping into their boatsand trying to devour them,even if they lit the bear on fire,but these kids don't see the polar bear that way,and actually they don't even see the polar bearthe way that I did back in the '80s.I mean, we thought of these animalsas mysterious and terrifying lords of the Arctic.But look now how quickly that climate changehas flipped the image of the animal in our minds.It's gone from that bloodthirsty man-killerto this delicate, drowning victim,and when you think about it, that's kind ofthe conclusion to the storythat the teddy bear started telling back in 1902,because back then, America had more or lessconquered its share of the continent.We were just getting around topolishing off these last wild predators.Now, society's reach has expandedall the way to the top of the world,and it's made even these, the most remote,the most powerful bears on the planet,seem like adorable and blameless victims.

8:25
But you know, there's also a
postscript to the teddy bear storythat not a lot of people talk about.We're going to talk about it,because even though it didn't really take longafter Roosevelt's hunt in 1902for the toy to become a full-blown craze,most people figured it was a fad,it was a sort of silly political novelty itemand it would go away once the president left office,and so by 1909, when Roosevelt's successor,William Howard Taft,was getting ready to be inaugurated,the toy industry was on the huntfor the next big thing.They didn't do too well.

8:58
That January, Taft was the guest of honorat a banquet in Atlanta,and for days in advance,the big news was the menu.They were going to be serving hima Southern specialty, a delicacy, really,called possum and taters.So you would have a whole opossumroasted on a bed of sweet potatoes,and then sometimes they'd leavethe big tail on it like a big, meaty noodle.The one brought to Taft's tableweighed 18 pounds.So after dinner, the orchestra started to play,and the guests burst into song,and all of a sudden, Taft was surprisedwith the presentation of a giftfrom a group of local supporters,and this was a stuffed opossum toy,all beady-eyed and bald-eared,and it was a new product they were putting forwardto be the William Taft presidency's answerto Teddy Roosevelt's teddy bear.They were calling it the "billy possum."Within 24 hours, the Georgia Billy Possum Companywas up and running, brokering dealsfor these things nationwide,and the Los Angeles Times announced,very confidently, "The teddy bearhas been relegated to a seat in the rear,and for four years, possibly eight,the children of the United Stateswill play with billy possum."So from that point, there was a fit of opossum fever.There were billy possum postcards, billy possum pins,billy possum pitchers for your cream at coffee time.There were smaller billy possums on a stickthat kids could wave around like flags.But even with all this marketing,the life of the billy possumturned out to be just pathetically brief.The toy was an absolute flop,and it was almost completely forgottenby the end of the year,and what that means is that the billy possumdidn't even make it to Christmastime,which when you think about it isa special sort of tragedy for a toy.

10:46
So we can explain that failure two ways.The first, well, it's pretty obvious.I'm going to go ahead and say it out loud anyway:Opossums are hideous. (Laughter)But maybe more importantly is thatthe story of the billy possum was all wrong,especially comparedto the backstory of the teddy bear.Think about it: for most of
human's evolutionary history,what's made bears impressive to ushas been their complete independence from us.It's that they live these parallel livesas menaces and competitors.By the time Roosevelt went hunting in Mississippi,that stature was being crushed,and the animal that he had roped to a treereally was a symbol for all bears.Whether those animals lived or died nowwas entirely up to the compassionor the indifference of people.That said something really ominousabout the future of bears,but it also said something very
unsettling about who we'd become,if the survival of even an animal like thatwas up to us now.So now, a century later, if you're at allpaying attention to what's
happening in the environment,you feel that discomfort so much more intensely.We're living now in an age of what scientistshave started to call "conservation reliance,"and what that term means is that we've disruptedso much that nature can't possibly
stand on its own anymore,and most endangered speciesare only going to surviveif we stay out there in the landscaperiggging the world around them in their favor.So we've gone hands-onand we can't ever take our hands off,and that's a hell of a lot of work.Right now, we're training condorsnot to perch on power lines.We teach whooping cranes
to migrate south for the winterbehind little ultra-light airplanes.We're out there feeding plague vaccine to ferrets.We monitor pygmy rabbits with drones.So we've gone from annihilating speciesto micromanaging the survival of a lot of speciesindefinitely, and which ones?Well, the ones that we've toldcompelling stories about,the ones we've decided ought to stick around.The line between conservation and domesticationis blurred.

12:55
So what I've been saying is that the storiesthat we tell about wild animals are so subjectivethey can be irrationalor romanticized or sensationalized.Sometimes they just have
nothing to do with the facts.But in a world of conservation reliance,those stories have very real consequences,because now, how we feel about an animalaffects its survivalmore than anything that you read aboutin ecology textbooks.Storytelling matters now.Emotion matters.Our imagination has become an ecological force.And so maybe the teddy bear worked in partbecause the legend of Rooseveltand that bear in Mississippiwas kind of like an allegoryof this great responsibility that societywas just beginning to face up to back then.It would be another 71 yearsbefore the Endangered Species Act was passed,but really, here's its whole ethosboiled down into something like a sceneyou'd see in a stained glass window.The bear is a helpless victim tied to a tree,and the president of the United Statesdecided to show it some mercy.Thank you.(Applause)[Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton]